The Cambridge History of the English Language Volume 5 Part 4 doc

Three commonly accepted categories of Ulster English will be referred to see Adams 1964b, Harris 1984a for details: Ulster Scots, the most clearly related lexically and phonologically to

earlier period Illustrated below are old and new consonantal alternationsfrom this period (see Hogan 1927; Irwin 1935: 164ff.; Henry 1958;Bliss 1979).

Major consonantal variations, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries

1 elision of <g> {lejnthe ' length', streinthen ' strengthen')

2 loss of final <d> {brone ' brand', greyons ' greyhounds')

3 ( w / v ) alternations {dewidit 'divided', wirgen 'virgin', wometted

' vomited'; vit' with', vilt' wilt')

4 ( t h / d ) or <(t) alternation [trone 'throne', wordy 'worthy';

oathes ' oats', theII' tell')

5 (C) and related spellings (Jbme 'whom', furle 'whirl', faat

' what\phit 'with')

6 <(s/sh) alternation {sheldom ' seldom', shuche ' such ',firsht' first';

sullynges ' shillings', sow'd' showed')

7 <ch/sh) alternation {chylver = shylver 'silver'; porsh 'porch',

shaine' chain')

8 (sh) spellings for historical [d3] {shantleman 'gentleman',

shudge 'judge')

As with the Forth and Bargy dialect, the characteristic Irish English

of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries appears to show only a partialadoption of the vowel shifts and splits associated with general ModernEnglish Spelling evidence for the reconstruction of syllabic phonology

in this period is difficult to interpret, given the diversity of text types andthe influence of perception on the depiction of Irish speech by non-Irishwriters Irwin (1935) and Bliss (1979), for example, show differentinterpretations of the <aa) spellings common in literature from this

period These spellings may be grouped as (a) aafter 'after', phaat 'what', waanity 'vanity', (b) plaash 'place\faash 'face', naame 'name', alternating with tawke 'take' andplaushes 'places', and (c)graat 'great', shpaaking 'speaking', alternating with bate 'beat' and spake 'speech',

where groupings roughly represent ME / a / , /a:/ and / e : / respectively.For Irwin (1935: 152-4), the <aa) spellings of groups (a) and (b)suggested a merger under [a:], with group (c) simply showing anoverextension of literary convention arising partly from developments

in England For Bliss (1979: 208ff.), however, a more complex set ofmergers and reanalyses is suggested In either case, the use of a vowelsuch as /a:/ in FACE words does not appear as part of modern IrishEnglish apart from the Forth and Bargy items as indicated above

While the evidence of <ea> spellings to suggest either / e : / or themore modern / i : / in this period is equivocal, the failure of historical / i : /

to diphthongise in Ireland appears characteristically in the data: note

preyd'pride', reepe 'ripe' and deereful'direful' from non-artistic texts of

the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in addition to dramatic

representations such as creesh 'Christ' and leek 'like' (Irwin 1935: 157).

Similarly, while Irwin (1935: 157-9) suggests that ME / o : / appears tohave followed the Great Vowel Shift pattern in raising to / u : / no later

than the early sixteenth century in Ireland (cf bloud 'blood', /using 'losing'), spellings such as hue 'how', shoowre 'sour' and fundation

'foundation' suggest that ME / u : / had not undergone isation at a comparable time

diphthong-Among the miscellaneous phonological developments which mayalso be mentioned here are the lowering of ME / i / to / e / and the raising

o f / e / to / i / Irwin (1935: 161-2) notes the first change in

sixteenth-century documents, as in ventadge' vintage', Lessmore' Lismore' and brege

'bridge', while Bliss (1979: 203) understood the second process as a

forerunner of modern Irish English, citing spellings such as min 'men', gitt 'get' and Use 'else' Characteristics not unique to Irish English but

generally seen to demonstrate the dialectal affinities of English in Ireland

at this time also include the frequent favouring of <ar) spellings in

words such as sarvant' servant' and clarge' clergy' (see Braidwood 1964:

54) as well as the apparent retention of [w] before [r] in sixteenth-century

wourytyng 'writing', worytten 'written' (Irwin 1935: 174-5).

Bliss' (1979) material displays several distinctive morphologicalcharacteristics, yet it is difficult to know the extent to which thesefeatures constitute genuine aspects of the grammar of Irish Englishrather than stereotypical language-learning phenomena Most notice-

able here is variation in the use of plural marking (Joot(e)s, mans, gooses vs sheldrens, mens, plural seeps' sheep'), the loss of past-participle morphemes (rob' robbed', undoo ' undone', break' broken'), and the loss of pronouns

as in Vashe soe hot is cou'dno quench/Deflame ' that he could not quench

the flame' (for commentary on pronoun loss see Guilfoyle 1986).Despite the widespread use of these and related features in literarywriting, the lack of these elements in other works of the time makes theinterpretation of the literary evidence inconclusive

Syntax characteristic of Irish English begins to emerge in this period

The use of after as a marker of tense/aspect is perhaps the most

noticeable characteristic, yet it is one for which modern usage mayobscure the nature of historical developments (Rather than suggest a

rigid distinction between tense, modality and aspect, I follow Dahl(1985) by referring to ' TMA categories' more generally in the following

discussion.) Shadwell's I will be after reconciling thee from 1681 (Bartley 1954: 130) appears to be the earliest example of after as a TMA marker;

this construction becomes characteristic of representations of Irishspeech during the eighteenth century In Shadwell's usage and in most

of the examples in the texts of Bliss (1979), after is used in a sentence

which refers to a future state of affairs, typically marked with the modal

verb will In modern Irish English, however, TMA-marking after is a perfective marker and never takes a future sense (I'm after missing the bus

'I have missed the bus'; see section 4.3.3 below)

Though Bartley (1954: 130) tends to dismiss uses of after with future

reference as mistakes by writers unfamiliar with genuine usage, Bliss(1979: 302—3) saw the frequency of these uses as suggesting an

independent sense of after in early texts Kelly (1989) has suggested that after may have had a regular status as a future marker, relying for her

position not on the rather complicated analogy with Irish prepositions

advanced by Bliss (1979), but on related uses of after signalling intention

or imminence of action found in other English dialects In Kallen

(1990), it is suggested that the early Irish English use of after in sentences

referring to future or non-actual states of affairs arises from the merger

of inherent features of English after with universal principles of TMA

systems under conditions of language contact and variability The

modern restriction of after to perfective uses is thus seen as a sort of decreolisation in which the variable range of significance for after is

limited in accord with the demands of the English TMA system

The Irish use of do as a verbal auxiliary apparently becomes perceived

as distinctive at some time in the eighteenth century (see also section

4.3.3) Auxiliary uses of do are well documented in general English for this period (see Visser 1969—73) and the choice of using do, at least in

Shakespearian drama, appears to have been conditioned by bothlinguistic and sociolinguistic factors (see Salmon 1965) The abundant

use of auxiliary do in some representations of Irish speech suggests a

caricature, as in the following passage from John Michelburne's 'Irelandpreserved' (Bartley 1954: 111):

By my fait, Dear joy, I do let de Trooparr ly wid my wife in de bad, hedoes ly at de one side and myself ly at de toder side, and my wife do lye

in de middle side; for fen I do go out to work in de cold morning, tothrashe my Corne, he doth cover her, and keep my wife fery faarme,and she does leave to get up, and look after de House, and fen de

Trooparr do get up, he does go and bring home de Seep and de Muck

['pig', Ir muc], and de Shucking Pigg, and we do Eat togeder.

Lexical items coming into Irish English between the sixteenth andeighteenth centuries are mostly of Irish origin, though some terms have

English or obscure origins Some, such as grey merchants 'merchants going out in Irish dress' and callodor, evidently a Dublin name for a person in charge of the death cart in times of plague (cf call-o-door), show

only local or short-term use (see Irwin 1935: 213ff.) Many Irish terms

could be listed from this period, including bother ' deafen' or ' bewilder with noise' (cf Ir bodhar 'deaf'), cosher denoting 'feasting' of a traditional type, and kerne, galloglass and rapparee, all terms connected

with soldiering: see Bliss (1977a) and lexicographical references insection 4.3.3

4.3.3 English in modern Ireland

Difficulty arises in tracing the transition from early modern to today'sIrish English Non-literary texts of the eighteenth century generallyshow the influence of standardised spelling and syntax similar to that ofEngland, while realism is largely lost in conventional representations ofIrish characters on stage Despite some indications from eighteenth-century dictionaries and prescriptive works (e.g Sheridan 1780, 1781;Walker 1802 [1791]), it is not until the development of more realisticliterary portrayals and the beginning of systematic dialect study in thenineteenth century that a picture of spoken Irish English becomesavailable

The dialectological record which is examined here points to complexrelationships between Ulster English and the English of the rest ofIreland Three commonly accepted categories of Ulster English will be

referred to (see Adams 1964b, Harris 1984a for details): Ulster Scots, the

most clearly related lexically and phonologically to Scots (foundprimarily in Antrim, north-east Down and part of Derry and Donegal);

South Ulster English, the variety most similar to Irish English outside of

Ulster (typical in south Armagh, south Monaghan, north Cavan, south

Fermanagh and south Donegal); and Mid-Ulster English, generally seen

to combine influences from the other two varieties (found in Antrim,including Belfast, south Tyrone, north Monaghan, north Fermanaghand part of south Donegal) For geographical discussion and maps, seeMilroy (1981) and Harris (1984a, 1985a) These labels should not be

taken to suggest predominance of one variety over another in any givenarea: local migration and language history militate against the es-tablishment of zones of dialectal exclusivity on a wide scale (seeBraidwood 1964) Moreover, the positing of well-defined dialectboundaries in Ulster does not imply either a total cleavage betweennorthern and southern varieties or uniformity in the south AlthoughUlster Scots shows the greatest divergence from other varieties of IrishEnglish, South and Mid-Ulster English share many features withsouthern Irish English, and there is no evidence to support thesuggestion (see Barry 1982: 110) that southern Irish English is moreuniform than that of Ulster.

General characteristics of Irish English which demonstrate something

of its historical development, either in a comparative or more localcontext, include the following: (1) the retention of historical / r / in allpositions; (2) the use of non-velar / I / in all positions, counterbalanced

in some locations by a tendency to use velarised [1] noted by Wells (1982)and Harris (1985a); (3) retention of the historical / h w / - / w / contrast,sometimes lost in Mid-Ulster English (see Harris 1984a); (4) traditionaluse of monophthongs /o(:)/ and /e(:)/ in words of the GOAT and FACEset; and (5) the use of epenthetic [a] in clusters consisting of a liquid

followed by a nasal in word-final position, as in ['Mam] film, ['haram] harm, ['lirjkabn] Lincoln, etc Feature (4) shows variation in so far as

diphthongisation of the / o u / and / e i / type is found throughout Irelandtoday, while Milroy (1981: 77) demonstrates that in Belfast, at least,other diphthongs such as [ewa] and [ra] may also represent / e / Feature(5) may be related to processes cited in section 4.3.1; it was also noted inthe eighteenth century (Walker 1802 [1791]; see also Irwin 1935) and

may be related to common metatheses such as ['madran] modern, f'sAdSaran] southern, ['psetran] pattern, and so on This feature is not

unique to Ireland, though the lexical incidence of it may differ from thatfound elsewhere

Significant vowel patterns in Irish English include the potential

merger of words such as meat, sea and decent with mate and say in the FACE category using / e : / rather than the / i : / of fleece, sleep, keep, etc A full discussion of the potential for a three-way distinction between meat, meet and mate, the theoretical implications of various merger possibilities, and the diachronic shift from historical [e:] in meat to [i:] is found in

Harris (1985a) For data concerning the distribution of [e:] and [e] in

meat words in rural Ireland, see Henry (1958: 110-11); for

docu-mentation in Dublin, note Bertz (1987)

Though Barry (1981c, 1982) suggests that southern Irish Englishdiffers from Ulster English in merging words of the PRICE and CHOICEsets with an unrounded diphthong, the actual dialect record does notsupport such a simple generalisation While mergers have been reported

in the south under unrounded vowels such as [ei] and [Ai] (Nally 1971)and [a + i] or [ai], rounded diphthongs such as [QI] are also found, andthe PRICE/CHOICE distinction may be preserved in various ways Thedistribution of lexical items in either set, however, may differ withinIreland and from the distribution found elsewhere (see Henry 1958;Wells 1982; Bertz 1987) In conservative Ulster Scots, sensitive to theScottish vowel-length rule often referred to as Aitken's Law (see Aitken1981), Early Scots / i : / gives rise to modern [ai] in the so-called 'short'

environments (e.g ripe, guide, mice, line, wild), while [ere] is favoured in 'long' environments as seen in five, tire, trial, tie and //a/(Harris 1985a:

27-8) Lexical distribution and the effects of other sound changes,however, mean that these two diphthongs are not in simple comp-lementary distribution; moreover, one may note Scottish-type lexical

realisations as in the use of [i:] in die and [st] in blind Southern Ulster

English, on the other hand, has a radically different system, basically

using [ai] in my, etc and [ai] in words of the boy type For details, see

Harris (1985a: 20ff.)

Independent Irish development of the ' FOOT-STRUT ' split in generalEnglish (Wells 1982: 196-9) becomes evident in the eighteenth centuryand today illustrates the variation possible within a single area of IrishEnglish phonology Though there are still diverging views on thehistorical sequence of development in the FOOT-STRUT split (see Harris

1990 for a review), it may be roughly assumed that the basic pattern forthis split involves five lexical categories, the first three of which stem

from ME / o : / while the others arise from ME / u / : (1) the mood group with modern / u : / ; (2) blood lowering to / A / ; (3) good raised and shortened to / u / ; (4) the cut group also undergoing lowering to / A / ; and (5) put now realised with / u / Scottish developments have taken a

different path, as Braidwood (1964: 57) points out, with the consequencethat Early Scots / o : / may now be realised with [i] or [e:] This pattern isfound in conservative Ulster Scots, for which Harris (1985a: 20) notes

cool and foot with [i], contrasting with [A] in words of the cut type.

Generally in Ulster English, but not in the south of Ireland, the

potential distinction between mood and good words may be lost, in that both word sets use the high central vowel [«] The mood class in the

south, I have noted, may include words taking [u] in many other

varieties (e.g., book, hook, brook, cook, cooker, Tootsie, cookie) and for

at least some speakers may merge with undiphthongised / u : / rather

than / a u / in pouch and possibly other words In addition to the vowels

associated with southern English or Scots, Irish English makesextensive use of a vowel intermediate between [o] and [A], described byWells (1982: 422) as 'mid centralized back somewhat unrounded' andgenerally transcribed as [5] This vowel is usually, though notexclusively, found in the STRUT category, potentially including both

words of the blood and cut type.

The Irish assignment of words to the STRUT group with [A]contrasting with assignment to the FOOT group with [u] as in England

is noted by Walker (1802 [1791]: 16), who lists nine words (most withpreceding labials) in which Irish English [A] contrasts with usage in

England: bull, bush, push, pull, pulpit, cushion, pudding, foot, and put (See

also Sheridan 1780.) In contemporary Irish English, most of Walker's

list could be realised with [A] or [u] and possibly with [o] Henry (1958:

153-4), for example, demonstrates considerable variation in this area In

south-west Leitrim, bush and pluck appear with a slightly centralised

version of low and advanced [u] in Henry's transcriptions [buj] and

[pluk], while birds, turnips and double appear with [5], transcribed by

Henry as [bordz], ['tornaps] and [dobl] In Westmeath, on the other

hand, uncentralised low and advanced [u] appears in turf [turf], birds [burdz], etc., while buck, thumb and wool appear in the mood class with [u]

and the vowel [5] is not listed

In Ulster, the / u / - / u / neutralisation and other factors yield adifferent, if related, configuration For the Ulster Scots dialect of Braid,

Co Antrim, Henry (1958 : 153—4) lists cut, lugs, bushes and much with [o], while school, how, house, too, cow and good, are all roughly united under [Y]

or [«] In Belfast vernacular, Harris (1985a: 150-1) distinguishes threelexical classes: a BOOT class with categorical / « / [boot, food,good), a BUT

class categorically taking /o/ {but, cud, blood), and a PUT/FOOT group in which [«] and [o] may alternate according to sociolinguistic or other factors (put, foot, full, look, pull, took, butcher, shook) (See also Milroy &

Milroy 1978: 25-7.)

The most significant consonantal variations in Irish English centrearound the realisation of general English /t, d, 0,6/ and palatalisationprocesses affecting in particular alveolar and velar consonants Thedental/alveolar group is discussed here in detail, with palatalisationtreated primarily as it relates to this group

A broad generalisation, often taken as indicative of the north-south

dialect division in Ireland (Barry 1981c; Harris 1985a), sees [0] and [5]regularly only in Ulster, with southern varieties typically using the non-strident affricates [t9] and [dd] or alveolar and dental stops A strictdialect separation, however, is not indicated: Henry (1958:122-3) notesthe variable use of [t9] and [d8] across his nine Ulster dialect points,while the fricatives [9] and [3] are also noted for some speakers insouthern urban varieties (see Wells 1982; Hickey 1986).

Phonological oppositions may be maintained in the absence of [9] and[5] with a dental/alveolar distinction as in [thm] thin vs [thm] tin (Wells

1982: 428-9) Yet fricatives may appear in the position of historical

stops, particularly before / r / : Henry (1958: 124-5) notes [drcri] dry, ['prehiz] praties 'potatoes', etc in Ulster as well as southern ['wD9ar]

water, [aQa '6rum] of the drum and ['lahad 'bDhamz] lotted bottoms.

(Dental realisations for / t / before / r / are also widely reported, thoughevidently declining at least among some younger speakers: see Milroy

& Milroy 1978.) Glottal varieties of / t / in Dublin include [?] (Bertz

1987) and [h] as in ['d^xkah] jacket, [(h)wah] what?'and ['skaerlah] scarlet ' embarrassed' in my observation.

The lenition of / t / and, less commonly, / d / to an alveolar fricativehas been noted since the nineteenth century (Hume 1878) and is alsofound in Irish English speech in Newfoundland (Clarke 1986) Thelenited segments are represented here by [{, d] (Wells 1982: 429); forfurther discussion and suggested transcriptions see Henry (1958: 123),Barry (1981c: 68), Conrick (1981: 73), Harris (1984a: 130), Hickey(1984: 235) and Bertz (1987: 45) Henry (1958:123-7) shows the lenitedsegments to be well distributed geographically, although he sees them

concentrated in south Leinster and the midlands: note ['g^tam] get him (Co Cavan), [did] did (Co Mayo), [ble:3t, 'blertan] bleat, bleating (Co Clare), where Henry's [t] = [tj and [d] = [d] While Barry (1981c) sees

the absence of final lenited stops as a defining characteristic of UlsterEnglish, Harris (1984a: 130) points out that despite the general lack offinal [tj in Ulster, intervocalic position may yield an intraregional

distinction in which Mid-Ulster English shows a voiced flap in pity, etc.

while southern Ulster English uses the lenited [£] in this position

Neutralisation of the tin/thin opposition may occur in several ways: (1) overlapping of realisations, as in [ta>tj] thatch, [wi'dout] without vs [h] or [t9] in letters and [t] or [t9] in butter (Henry 1958: 123-7); (2) dentalisation before / r / resulting in homophones such as [tri:] tree, three

or ['briidar] breeder, breather (Wells 1982: 431), although dentalisation is

generally blocked before a morpheme boundary so that, for example,

matter contrasts with fatter (Harris 1984a: 130); and (3) loss of dentalisation before alveolars such as /I, s/ (e.g [kits] faiths, fates) for speakers who would otherwise use [t] or [t9] in words of the thin group

(Wells 1982: 431)

Palatalisation processes also complicate the distribution of dental,

alveolar and velar segments Words of the tune, Tuesday type showing [tJ]

in many non-Irish varieties most often show [tJ] in Irish English; Irwin(1935: 422) dates this development to the eighteenth century The use ofpalatalised [k] and [a] rather than palatalised alveolars was early noted

by Burke (1896: 698) in spellings such as ' opportkunity' and 'forkune'

to characterise the speech of Meath, Kildare and Carlow; cf similar datafrom Antrim (Henry 1958: 127-9) and Westmeath (Nally 1971)

Palatalisation of velars (e.g [kjart] cart, [kjap] cap) is also widely noted

(described by Henry (1958: 115) as 'a Northern and Eastern featurefading to the West and South') and may be compared with an inverse use

of alveolars as in [tlutj] clutch, ['tle'Bnanz] cleanings and [tlamp] clamp

(Henry 1958: 129)

Salient features of Irish English syntax include (a) systems of clauseconjunction and embedding, (b) the use of topicalisation and clefting,(c) a variety of prepositional and adverbial constructions, and (d) adistinctive set of TMA markers These features are generally taken todemonstrate either affinities to other English dialects or the influence of

an Irish-language 'substratum': the following discussion simply cribes the most commonly cited elements, while section 4.4 addressesthe substratum question Material cited below under '(JK)' is takenfrom my fieldwork in Dublin

des-Co-ordinate structures such as He wouldn't give me a penny an' he rotten with money (Burke 1896: 787) or The si%e of er and she barking! (JK) are

widely reported in works on Irish English, while embedded clause types

often noted are illustrated by You would wonder what colour was the horse (Shee 1882: 372), I wonder was the horse well bred (Hayden & Hartog 1909: 938), What's the cause you didn't go ? (Henry 1957:123), They laughed at you in

a way that you' d nearly turn against the Irish language (Lunny 1981:139), and to show them pictures and see is there any difference between the deaf children and the others (JK).

Topicalisation and related phenomena have been examined in detail

by Filppula (1986) Filppula points out that topicalisation in IrishEnglish may fulfil a variety of discourse functions such as contrast,

reassertion and specification (e.g Cold as ever it were; In splints it would

come off, where splints refers to an established topic; and In some building he

is working with the couple of weeks ' for a couple of weeks', respectively) in

addition to the emphatic function usually ascribed for English (as in

Aye, in the middle of the night they'dprobably arrive) By comparison with a

British English corpus and with the use of intuitive judgements andgeographical analyses, Filppula (1986) further establishes that the range

of topicalisation types and frequency of topicalisation in discourse isgreater in Irish English than in the British data, and that within Irelandthe use of this device appears to increase in inverse proportion to theamount of time over which English has been spoken in a given locality.Among the many prepositional and adverbial structures which havebeen commented on in dialect studies may be noted the following: (1)

the use of on as a dative of disadvantage {When the rent was doubled on me (Shee 1882: 373); I bought an ice cream and she rubbed it in my hair on me (JK); and in various possessive uses (There's no loss on him 'he has nothing to complain about', What's on you? 'what's the matter with you?' (Henry 1957: 148)); (2) prepositional marking of possession (The body is very small with a crow 'A crow's body is very small' (Henry 1957: 133); / scalded the hand o meself'my hand' (JK); It was a custom by them to go out on Christmas Eve' their custom' (Lunny 1981:140)); (3) other prepositional uses (He's dead now with many ayear ' for many a year' (Lunny 1981: 139); He's in his chest 'bare chested', She's in her health 'healthy' (Henry 1957: 146)); and (4) the use of in it to denote general existence, as in There are no

horses in it (van Hamel 1912: 286), There's a good wind in it, today (Ni

Ghallchoir 1981: 157-8), and Is there any jeans in it? 'available' (JK).

Distinctions of tense and aspect in Irish English, referred to in theirearlier stages in section 4.3.2, have been widely noted since thenineteenth century The use of habitual markers to denote recurrent orgeneric states of affairs and the variety of means for marking a perfectiveTMA category have received particular attention and are discussed here.Habitual or generic time categories may be grammatically marked in

Irish English in three ways: (1) inflected do, (2) inflected be, and (3) inflected do plus non-finite be Geographical distribution for these forms

is unclear Bliss (1984a), Guilfoyle (1983) and Harris (1984b) have

associated inflected be forms with Ulster, while Dublin-based studies

(Kallen 1986,1989; Bertz 1987) show no such realisations Yet inflected

do has been reported throughout Ireland, while data from Co Meath

(Henry 1958: 133) and Co Dublin (O'Neill 1947: 264) also reveal

inflected be Henry's (1957) Roscommon study and Todd's (1984) Ulster

survey show all three realisation types

Henry (1957), Harris (1984b) and Todd (1984) discuss the use of thesethree markers with slightly different semantic feature specifications foreach one: in Kallen (1989) it is argued that these semantic shadings arebest subsumed by a single 'generic/habitual (GH)' category, des-ignating that a state of affairs ' holds true either as an inherent quality of aclass of objects or due to the recurrence of particular actions, processes,

etc.' (Cf generic do in Somerset English, noted by Ihalainen 1976.) Examples of generic/habitual do are given below In all cases, do is not

stressed and may be elided to [da] or a syllabic consonant It is not to be

confused with emphatic do.

Generic/ habitual markers in Irish English

1 Inflected do

He does come when he hears the noise (Henry 1957: 171)

Me ma does tell me I'm livin on my nerves (Kallen 1989: 6)

2 Inflected be

There bees no partition between the cows (Henry 1958: 133)Well there be's games in it and there be's basketball, darts and all(Harris 1984b: 306)

3 Inflected do plus be

(a) With auxiliary be

He diz be singin' (Todd 1984: 171)

He does be weighing things out for me for when I'm on me own(Kallen 1989:7)

(b) Copular be

That's how the master does be (Henry 1958: 133)

Those pancakes do be gorgeous (Kallen 1986: 135)

The perfective TMA category in Irish English may be marked in anumber of ways which differ from the general Modern English pattern

using have plus -en} Most analyses have concentrated on these alternative markers, obscuring the extent to which the general English have pattern

is used in Ireland as well as the converse use of other patterns outside ofIreland: for comments see Hayden & Hartog (1909), Henry (1957),Harris (1983, 1984b), Milroy (1984) and Kallen (1989, 1990) Perfect

marking with after, discussed in section 4.3.2, has attracted considerable attention as an Irish form: traditional accounts suggest that after perfects

denote the recency of an event (van Hamel 1912: 276) or the conclusion

of an action (Henry 1958: 64, 177) Harris (1984b: 308) uses the 'hotnews' label of McCawley (1971) to encapsulate such notions An

Extended Present perfect form with a tensed stative verb such as be or

know is taken by Harris (1984b: 308-9) to refer to a' situation initiated in

the past and persisting into the present', while an AccomplishmentPerfect said to show a 'preoccupation with state' (Henry 1957:177) and

perfects with be plus ' mutative verbs such as leave, change, die, go' (Harris

1984b: 308) have also been cited

It should be noted, however, that these four perfect-marking devices

do not refer exclusively to any well-defined semantic category In Kallen

(1989: 10-11), for example, uses of after are shown across all of

McCawley's categories of the perfect and are thus not limited to ' hotnews'; conversely, other perfect markers are seen in 'hot news'contexts In Kallen (1990), an attempt is made to match McCawley'scategories with Irish English perfect markers: this attempt runs counter

to the data, and it is suggested instead that the choice of perfect markerreflects a complex interaction of factors such as recency, transitivity,dynamism and lexical selection in addition to semantic considerations.Regardless, then, of the factors which influence the selection of general

English have or any other device for perfect marking, the list below

provides examples of the broadly perfective TMA markers of IrishEnglish, using the category labels of Kallen (1989; see also Younge1923-4 and Bliss 1979)

Perfect markers in Irish English

1 Perfects with after

I am after writing a letter (Hayden & Hartog 1909: 933)

Children can't believe they can take their coats off in thisweather; they're after bein inside so many times (Kallen 1989:11)

2 ' Extended present' perfects

He's working these years on it (Henry 1957: 172)

We're living here seventeen years (Harris 1984b: 309)

I know him for a long time (Kallen 1989: 15)

3 ' Accomplishment' perfects

She's nearly her course finished (Harris 1984b: 307)

Have you your tea taken? (Henry 1957: 177)

He has my heart broken (Taniguchi 1956: 59)

Interest in the Irish English lexicon is generally focused on theincorporation of words from Irish or on the historical retention anddevelopment of words of English or Scots origin There is no IrishEnglish dialect dictionary, and most of the work done in this areaconsists of word-lists either in bare form or with cross-references to the

EDD, OED and Irish dictionaries.

Ulster vocabulary has inspired a number of compilations (e.g.Patterson 1860; Patterson 1880; Bigger 1923; Traynor 1953), althoughall such works demonstrate an overlap between the Ulster lexicon andthat found in the rest of Ireland Ulster terms with etymological

connections to Scotland or the North of England include whitrit 'weasel, stoat', ferntickles 'freckles', stroup 'spout of a kettle', elder ' udder', skelf splinter (n., vb)', lith' segment of an orange', while terms apparently restricted to Ulster include champ ' colcannon' (a traditional Irish food), coggelty-curry 'see-saw', street 'a farmyard', diamond 'town square' and libbock 'a small piece of anything' (see Patterson 1880;

Traynor 1953; Henry 1958; Gregg 1972; Adams 1977; Robinson 1984).Within Ulster, further divisions may be noted so that, for example,

typically Scots grammatical constructions such as dinnae, cannae, hinnae and maunae are frequently noted for Ulster Scots, while Gregg (1972: 113) notes a dialect division between Ulster Scots use of bag vs general Ulster elder 'udder', and cassey or close 'farmyard' in place of general Ulster street Traynor (1953) cites many words as belonging to Donegal

only, although such a strict geographical restriction must be regarded

cautiously: examples include subs ' footwear, especially old', pook ' the grain in wood; temper in a person', and prashlach 'odds and ends;

rubbish, as small sticks and stones'

The division between 'Irish' and 'English' components in the

general Irish English lexicon is not always clear A word like grig, greg 'tantalise, make jealous, annoy' has an English history (see the OED), yet shares a cognate Irish verb griog: in any given location, it may be

difficult to assess whether the use of the word represents a retentionfrom English, a carry-over from Irish, or a combination of the twofactors Word-internal code-switching is common as well, in that, for

example, the Irish diminutive suffix -in may attach to many English nouns {maneen, girleen, bouseen, etc are frequently noted), while Irish words may assume English nominal or verbal morphology (e.g cipins 'little sticks of wood' < Ir cipin + E s; rdimming 'speaking nonsense'

< Ir rdime'is' nonsense' -I- E -ing) Lexical reanalysis showing interaction

between Irish and English is exemplified in the most general meaning

'naughty' (in the sense of a child's behaviour) for bold in Irish English, evidently acquired from the translation of Ir ddna, which has both this

behavioural sense and that of general English 'brazen, audacious', etc

In the following selection of lexical items, many may have only localdistribution or may take different senses in different speech com-munities : appropriate patterns of distribution have not been chartedsystematically

Material in the Irish English lexicon which stems from English orScots sources is not necessarily unique to Ireland, but may be cited if (a)found in a different sense from that used elsewhere, (b) retained moregenerally than in England (either geographically or socially), or (c)retained in Ireland past a date when it is considered to have become' obsolete' in England Material of this kind includes the following, citedfrom Ua Broin (1944), Traynor (1953), Braidwood (1964), Bliss (1972b,

1984a) and my own observations: cog 'cheat in school, examinations', chisler 'child', bowsey 'disreputable drunkard; troublemaker', cod' ]o\ae., hoax (n.); tease, playfully deceive (vb)', mott 'girlfriend, girl', press 'cupboard', beholden to in the sense 'depending on' (Ua Broin (1944: 164) I'm not beholden to that 'I have other resources to fall back on'), power 'a great many, a great deal', airy 'lively, fond of pleasure', odious [o-.A^s] (also wodious) 'exceedingly, exceedingly great' and oxter 'armpit' The term mitch 'play truant' is widely reported; Ua Broin (1944: 147) also notes jerring, while I have informally noted dossing (general), daubing (Belfast), scheming (Galway, Donegal, Clare; see also Traynor 1953), and go on the lang (Cork) Probably the best-known coinings apparently native to Ireland are hames, as in makes a hames oj this

'a ludicrously unsuccessful attempt to perform some action' (Bliss

1984a: 143; cf also a horse's collar used in the same way) and joke' a thing'

in general Both terms are widely used, and Bliss (1984a) suggestsderivations for both from terms related to the harnessing of animals

The Irish-based material in Irish English shows multiple layers ofhistorical derivation and geographical variation which may reflect local

conditions of bilingualism and language shift Terms such as garran, as

noted above, belong to the earliest Irish English yet are reported

relatively recently as well (Henry 1958) Others, such as poiti'n (a traditional illicit distilled spirit), dillisk (a type of seaweed) or piseog ' a

traditional superstitious belief or practice', have been thoroughlyintegrated into the Irish English lexicon in the absence of any vernacularEnglish-based lexical equivalent While some such terms may be seen asborrowings, many others are more accurately described as retentions or

apports in the sense of Allsopp (1980: 93ff.): apports typically accompany

large-scale language contact and shift, and may exhibit what Allsoppterms ' slips, shifts, and innovations' which reflect' intimate L2 [secondlanguage] cultural survivals' not found in the regular borrowingprocesses of more settled languages

The extent of Irish lexical retention at various times is welldocumented in local and more general studies Lists published in

Irisleabhar Na Gaedhilge ('Irish words' 1900-1), An Sguab ('Comortas'

1922-3, 1923-5), and by Lysaght (1915) documented hundreds of Irishwords commonly used in areas which had become English-speakingmany years previously O hAnnrachain (1964) provides a lexicon of over

500 Irish words from a part of Co Kerry in which the Irish language hadbecome essentially lost over the preceding 100 years This list isparticularly significant in that it contains many entries not found or nolonger used in vernacular Gaeltacht Irish or in the standard literarylanguage Nally (1971) also refers to the existence of over 250 Irishwords in the local district of a part of Co Westmeath which had becomeAnglicised between 1750 and 1800

Any selection from such a large potential Irish sublexicon isnecessarily arbitrary Many terms have no standardised spelling andappear in word-lists either in an Anglicised form (often highlyidiosyncratic) or in Irish orthography While some words have near-universal distribution, others are more restricted to particular localities

or domains such as agriculture, animal life, etc Words such as blather 'nonsense (n.); talk nonsense (vb)', reek 'mountain' and gob 'mouth'

show the kind of multiple or obscure etymology illustrated above for

g ri

g-With these reservations in mind, a selected list of Irish words isincluded below, cited from sources noted thus far, including also Henry(1958) Irish orthography is used unless otherwise noted, for examplewhere common usage dictates English or joint entries Thus note:

neanntog 'nettle', castarbhdn 'dandelion', bairneach 'limpet'; blathach 'buttermilk', tormas 'carping at food' {She had a tormas against eggs,

O hAnnrachain 1964: 89), crubeen (E) 'pig's foot'; ciotog 'left-handed person, left hand', amaddn' fool', strt'opach' whore', duine le Dia' innocent fool' (lit 'person of God'), flaithitilach 'generous, good-hearted', balbh 'indistinct or stammering in speech', straoill/street (E) 'slovenly girl (n.); trail about (vb)',gombeen (E)' a profiteer'; breillis breallis' nonsense', cabchaint 'proud, arrogant talk', canran 'complain, grumble', pldmds 'smooth talk, flattery', cogar 'whisper'; glaum 'snatch, grab', bacaidij

bockedy (E) 'unstable, unsteady', grd ' l o v e ' , meas 'respect',puca 'spirit, apparition', cdibin 'an old hat' Other terms have more pragmatic significance than lexical content: acusbla (E) 'my dear', a mhic ' s o n ' (both terms of address); mar dheadh / moryah (E) literally 'as it were', an ironic tag ending; sldinte literally 'health', a toast for drinks; and so on.

4.3.4 Sociolinguistic perspectives in Irish English

Much of the political history of Ireland is reflected in the ideologicalstatus attached to the English and Irish languages The foundation oforganisations such as the Gaelic Society in 1807 and the subsequentdevelopment of a national Irish-language movement (see 6 Murchii1985) coincided with political movements for Irish independence to theextent that the language policy of the independent governmentestablished after the partition of Ireland in 1921-2 was firmly orientatedtowards the support of the Irish language Though complicated bypolitical and economic considerations (see Commins 1988; Tovey 1988),policy in the Republic of Ireland is reflected in the comments of a 1965

White Paper {Athbheochan 1965):

The Irish language is an integral part of our culture Down thecenturies it has moulded and given expression to the thoughts andfeelings of the Irish people English, of course, has also contributed toour national heritage but the English we speak still bears the imprint

of the attitudes of mind and modes of expression which prevailedwhen Irish was the language of general use It is through Irish as aliving language that we and those who come after us can most surelyretain a lively sense and understanding of the unique and essentialelements of the Irish character

In a similar vein, Henry (1974: 32—3) contrasts the two languages asfollows:

The only possibility for a national future as a distinct or distinctivepeople that Ireland can have lies in conserving, strengthening,renewing the Irish Gaelic tradition The monoglot English-speaking Irishman is dominated by the manner of England eitherimmediately or ultimately In other words, an Irishman speakingEnglish is not in the same category as an Englishman The languagehas only been rented out to him

The view of Irish English as not only alien but in some sense lessvalued than 'standard' English, referred to by Croghan (1986) as

'brogue-speak', comes through in various treatments Burke (1896:702), for example, explains the separate development of the IrishEnglish lexicon as 'partly owing to our imperfect grasp of English',while the comments of Clery (1921: 552) could hardly be more blunt:' we certainly have not learned how to speak English, for we have notacquired its sounds Like the Chinese with their " pidgin " English, wehave merely learnt how to make ourselves understood by a system ofmis-pronounced English words, incapable of literary development.'Counterbalancing the deprecation of Irish English are both thehistorical view that the English-speaking peasantry of Ireland possessed

an English ' superior' to that of their English counterparts (see Dinelyquoted above, Bush 1769: 34-6, and Edgeworth 1848 [1801]: 150) and abelief in the greater expressive power of Irish English Writers such as

J M Synge, Lady Gregory, W B Yeats and others in the 'Irish literaryrevival' of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries madeconscious use of language based on that of rural speakers from districtsonly then undergoing Anglicisation Sean O'Casey and James Joyceamong others made use of Dublin vernacular and more general IrishEnglish, while Edgeworth (1848 [1801]), Shee (1882) and Stockley(1927) registered complaints against both the unrealistic representation

of Irish English in satirical or stereotyped portrayals and the rejection byothers of Irish English as a valid medium of expression The estimation

of Dublin vernacular by Krause (1960:234-5) in discussing the works ofO'Casey is illustrative:

Most Irishmen, but particularly the proud and garrulous people of theDublin slums, have an instinctive love of word-play Theircharacteristically emphatic speech is coloured with archaisms, mal-apropisms, puns, invectives, polysyllables, circumlocutions, allit-erations, repetitions, assonances, and images Such a word-hoard ofcolloquial rhetoric suggests that there may be a relationship betweenthe spoken language of Elizabethan London and the spoken language

of modern Dubliners

This debate between those who have found Irish English vernaculars

to be both linguistically and culturally expressive and those with otherviews, either through loyalty to Irish or by the sense of 'standard'English lying somewhere outside of Ireland, has rarely surfaced overtly

It remains, however, an important part of the overall sociology oflanguage in Ireland: see O Riagain (1988b) and Kallen (1988) for furtherdiscussion

In Northern Ireland, macro-level sociolinguistics has taken a

dis-tinctive turn Despite the effects of English-speaking plantations, Irishcontinued to be spoken as a vernacular in much of Ulster in thenineteenth century, and has continued in some parts of Northern Ireland

to recent times (see Adams 1964a; O Dochartaigh 1987) During theeighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Protestant religious activity

in Ulster included Bible translation and publication, the establishment ofschools and public preaching aimed at the Irish-speaking Catholicpopulation This activity often worked together with an antiquarian,cultural and nationalist interest in Irish which spanned religiousdivisions: for details, see O Casaide (1930), 6 Snodaigh (1973), and acritical analysis by the British and Irish Communist Organisation (1973)

In later years, however, with the growth of Irish nineteenth-centurypolitical nationalism, the Irish language in Ulster ceased to play aunifying function in so far as it became associated with the drive for Irishindependence Pritchard (1990: 30) documents the popularity of Irish as

a secondary-school subject in Northern Ireland, noting an interest inIrish that has been 'growing in the Nationalist community from the1960s onwards' (see also Hamill 1986), yet it would be an over-simplification to suggest that the use of Irish in Northern Ireland today

is limited to the 'nationalist' population O Glaisne (1981: 870), forexample, cites a loyalist assertion that' Ulster Protestants have as muchclaim, if not more in some cases, to the Gaelic culture as the RomanCatholic population', while Pritchard (1990: 30-1) discusses Irish-language organisations in the North which cite the historical commonusage of Irish in trying to 'nail the myth that Irish is the property only ofthe Nationalists and Catholic community'

In addition to the issue of relations between Irish and English, Ulstermacro-level sociolinguistics is distinguished by a unique Ulster Scotsliterary and folk tradition: see Adams (1958, 1977) for discussion andAdams (1989) for an extensive bibliography Thus the issue of languageloyalty in Northern Ireland (cross-cut by divisions of political, ethnicand personal loyalty and status), while not yet investigated in detail, can

be expected to differ fundamentally from that in the Republic

Perhaps not coincidentally, it is in Northern Ireland that the study ofsocially conditioned language variation has taken hold The works ofMilroy (1976), Milroy & Milroy (1978) and others (see Milroy 1986 for asynopsis) have investigated phonology in Belfast vernacular English indetail, while related work such as that of Milroy (1980), Milroy & Harris(1980), Pitts (1985, 1986) and Milroy & Milroy (1985) has examinedboth the phonology of surrounding areas and a host of theoretical issues

Belfast speaker

a a

+++++

{Milroy 1986)

3

+++

+

+

concerning the relationship between variation and historical change,fieldwork methodology in sociolinguistics and models of sociallymotivated variation and change

Of the many variables examined in the Belfast studies, variationwithin the lexical set with / a / may illustrate the dynamic involved.Within this set, two contrary tendencies may be noted: raising towards/ e / , particularly before velar consonants, and backing or backraising

towards /o/ in other environments (see Milroy & Milroy 1978: 27-9).

The set of realisations for a working-class male Belfast speaker reading aword-list is shown by Milroy (1986: 40), seen in table 4.3, where a ' + 'represents use of a value Milroy (1986: 40—1) contrasts this broad range

of realisations with those of two middle-class speakers, one of whomshows only two words for which [a] is not the realisation, while theother uses [a] in all cases

Faced with such complex variation, the Belfast studies have movedaway from an attempt to rely on a single linguistic dimension (such asvowel height or backness) correlating directly with a speaker variablesuch as socio-economic class, towards the analysis of factors which leadspeakers to 'move away from the most highly localised usage,containing as it often does alternations, overlaps and near-mergers thatnormalised varieties avoid' (Milroy 1986: 44) The movement towards' normalised' varieties in Belfast is not necessarily in the direction of aninstitutional 'prestige' value In the Clonard district of West Belfast, forexample, younger females use backing of / a / more frequently than their

male counterparts and far more frequently than their female parts in the East Belfast working-class district of Ballymacarrett.Style-shifting away from backing in formal speech and higher use ofbacking among male speakers in Ballymacarrett, however, suggests thatbacking is a low-prestige variation in this location: nevertheless, it is thisvalue which Clonard females are adopting (see Milroy & Milroy 1978:28-9).

counter-Sociolinguistic research on Ulster syntax has examined syntacticvariables which may be widespread outside Ulster, but which have notfeatured in traditional examinations of Irish English Finlay & McTear(1986: 176) list eleven syntactic variables in a study of Belfastschoolchildren, including (1) the use of vernacular past tenses (e.g /

seen), (2) demonstratives as ml love them sweets, (3) negative concord (e.g.

I didn't feel nothin), (4) singular concord (e.g Me and Denise wasplayiri), (5) 'Ins-suffix' (e.g themins/yw(ins), (6)for-to complements (e.g I went for to see him), and (7) whenever used to denote a single definite event (e.g Whenever he came back in 'when he came ') Finlay & McTear's set of

variables is geographically mixed Features such as points (l)-(4) and (6)above occur readily throughout Ireland Others, such as (7), are less

widespread (though note I was kind of really surprised whenever I got the first one (JK)), and some may not occur in the south of Ireland Finlay &

McTear show a strong relationship between social class and the use ofvernacular variants, with the only substantial middle-class use of

vernacular forms occurring with whenever and negative concord among female speakers The for-to structure was found only among working-

class male speakers, while variables such as demonstratives appear with

a roughly even distribution between the sexes in this social class

Social divisions between Catholic and Protestant speakers have raisedthe question of ethnolinguistic differences in Ulster While Milroy(1981: 44) argues that 'there is as yet no persuasive evidence to showthat the two ethnic groups in Belfast (and Ulster) can be clearly identified

by differences in accent', and that' the differences that do exist are mainlyregional', Todd (1984) has attempted to muster such evidence on thebasis of a rural sample (See also Todd 1989a.) Millar (1987) hasvigorously rejected Todd's hypothesis on historical, methodologicaland empirical grounds, demonstrating considerable interpenetration offeatures between the two putative subdialects O'Neill's (1987) research

in Armagh similarly shows only quantitative variation, rather thancategorical difference, in the frequency of vernacular phonologicalrealisations across the two communities Table 4.4 compares the use of

Table 4.4 Realisation of /k, g/ before /ar/ in Armagh {O'Neill 1987)

stop

52 20 20 10

Glide insertion

10 0 1 0

Velar stop

10 15 13 43

Informal Palatal stop

40 55 54 40

speech (%) Glide insertion

50 30 33 17

three phonetic values in the realisation of/k, g/ before /ar/ in words

such as car and care These realisations (velar [k, g], palatal stop [kg], and

velar plus glide [kj, g1]) demonstrate the importance of style shift andsex-linked variation no less than any other factors (data based on O'Neill1987: 23-5; see also Pitts 1985, Milroy 1980, and for related issuesMilroy 1987)

4.4 Related studies in Irish English

The theoretical significance of Irish English as a contact vernacular,displaying both generations of language contact and isolation fromhistorical sources in England, was perhaps first noted by van Hamel(1912) Interest in this topic was also expressed by Antoine Meillet (seeVendryes 1937) and later linguists such as Sommerfelt (1958), Hill(1962) and Breatnach (1967—8) Arguments concerning the origins ofIrish English features such as the phonology of the dental/alveolargroup of consonants, perfective forms in syntax, and various aspects of

the lexicon have tended to be framed in either substratumist or retentionist

terms Substratumist explanations rely largely on the notions of' transfer' or' interference' from Irish to English (see e.g Henry 1960-1,1977; Bliss 1972a, 1977b; Hickey 1982), while a retentionist positionseeks support from the history or dialectal distribution of English itself(as in Burke 1896; Harris 1983; Kallen 1986; Lass 1987, 1990; Kelly1989)

Substratumist arguments may be readily illustrated with examples

from syntax The perfect with after, discussed in section 4.3, is often

attributed to the influence of a comparable structure in Irish Thus, forexample, Harris (1984b: 319) cites the parallel between Irish and IrishEnglish as follows (see also Lunny 1981: 137ff.):

Irish: Ta si treis an bad a dhfol.

be + non-past she after the boat selling

Irish English: She is after selling the boat.

Similarly, Harris (1984b: 319) notes the parallel usage in the complishment Perfect and Irish TMA-marking, citing

Ac-Irish: Ta an bad diolta aici.

be + non-past the boat sold at-her

The Irish English generic/habitual use of do is also commonly compared

to Irish, which marks a distinction between punctual and non-punctualcategories, as in examples from Todd (1984: 171):

Ta me tuirseach (BE I tired)

Bionn me tuirseach (BE + regularity I tired)

Hickey (1982: 40) also notes the Irish English dative of disadvantage incomparison with Irish, citing

Irish: Chuaigh an t-anraidh thar fiuchadh orm.

went the soup over boiling on-me

Irish English: The soup boiled over on me.

Yet traditional substratumist claims, based largely on simple parisons between isolated sentences of Irish and Irish English, oftenmeet with compelling counter-evidence Harris (1984b), in fact, whilenoting the Irish parallels with Irish English, also examines historical

com-British English syntax and concludes (p 320) that, except for the after perfect, forms such as the Accomplishment and be perfects 'far from

being innovations with an exclusive background in substratuminterference, are actually retentions of older English patterns' (see also

Harris 1983) Possible English sources for perfects with after have been

noted in section 4.3.2; the rarity of the comparable Irish construction inhistorical and contemporary language corpora has been pointed out byGreene (1979) and is used by Kelly (1989) as part of the argument for anEnglish source Comparisons between the Irish and general EnglishTMA-marking systems establish an asymmetry with regard to generic/

habitual states of affairs; they do not, however, account for do as the

Irish English lexical marker of the generic/habitual category Here the

nature of periphrastic do in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English

may be invoked as a crucial factor: see Kallen (1986) for details.Concerning the dative of disadvantage, Lass (1986) has argued againstHickey's interpretation, noting the availability of this construction inAmerican English as well as parallel constructions in German and Latin.

A more recent trend in analysis puts Irish English in a globalperspective, either by comparing developments in Ireland with those inother speech communities or by examining the role of linguisticuniversals in developing Irish English Clarke (1986), for example,examines the phonology of Irish English-influenced speakers inNewfoundland, while J Williams (1986) and Rickford (1986) havedrawn connections between the external history of Irish settlement inthe Caribbean and shared linguistic features of Irish and CaribbeanEnglish Harris (1986) concentrates on possible links between IrishEnglish habitual markers and those found in Atlantic Creoles andCaribbean English as well as in American black English vernacular Inlater papers, Harris (1987, 1990) concentrates on phonological re-construction and historical development, again using a data base whichincludes Ireland alongside Caribbean and other Englishes

In perhaps the most far-reaching undertaking of this kind,Montgomery (1989) traces possible connections between AppalachianEnglish and the dialects of Scotland, England and Ireland (especially

Ulster) Montgomery examines variables such as 'positive anymore' (e.g Wool is so expensive anymore 'nowadays' (JK); see also Milroy 1981: 4), the use of auxiliary do and inflected be, single concord (see section 4.3.4), the use of relative pronouns (e.g., Who is this was telling me ) and

characteristics of auxiliaries and modal verbs In examining the data,Montgomery (pp 235—40) proposes a set of linguistic and externalcriteria for testing the possibility of historical connection betweengeographically separated language varieties This work is thus sig-nificant not only for placing the debate about the origins of Irish Englishwithin a wider framework, but for examining the overall history ofsyntactic variation in English

The possibility that features of Irish English arise from neithersubstratum nor retentionist influences, but from a third source oflanguage universals made manifest in the contact situation has beenexplored particularly by Filppula (1990); related suggestions concerning

after (Kallen 1990) have already been mentioned (see also Kallen 1981).

Filppula (1990) presents a systematic account of these three sources ofderivation for Irish English topicalisation, making use of bothtypological and psycholinguistic universals in his analysis Ultimately,

for Filppula, no source can be completely ruled out and it is suggested(p 52) that' a combination of two or more factors is indeed the mostlikely alternative'.

Also of more general application, the work of Milroy (1980) uses IrishEnglish data to enrich sociolinguistic theory and methodology in its

own right In particular Milroy demonstrates the value of social network

as a conceptual tool in sociolinguistic research, demonstrating its clearerarticulation, at least in some cases, with patterns of linguistic variationthan that possessed by measures such as socio-economic class Harris(1985a) uses Ulster data to expand theories of lexically governedphonological change and to query some well-known concepts of thephonetics of phonological merger Problems of sociolinguistic field-work have been discussed in considering the effect of a non-localinterviewer on the use of vernacular speech in a rural Co Derry town(Douglas-Cowie 1978) and in assessing the sociolinguistic and gram-

matical distribution of perfective after in Dublin (Kallen 1991).

Issues in cross-dialectal language comparison have been discussed byMilroy (1984) in the light of evident conflict between Irish and otherEnglish varieties (see also Harris 1984a, 1985b) Focusing on gram-matically based misunderstandings occurring in discourse, Milroy(1984) demonstrates that superficial similarities between syntacticconstructions may mask deep-seated differences at the level of grammar.Filppula (1991) illustrates a similar point in considering the Irish

English use of and as mentioned in section 4.3.3 Although this

Irish English pattern resembles some marginal constructions in BritishEnglish, Filppula's grammatical and quantitative approach suggeststhat the Irish and British systems are fundamentally different, with the

Irish English use of ' subordinating and' representing an independent

development

Studies of the linguistic aspects of Anglo-Irish literature are rare,although van Hamel (1912), Taniguchi (1956), and Goeke & Kornelius(1976) all use literary samples for their analyses Sullivan (1980) examinesthe changes in the literary representation of Irish English from thesixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, critically analysing these rep-resentations and their reflection of changes in Irish English duringperiods of intensive language contact More general reviews of languageand literature are found in Garvin (1977), Kiely (1977) and Todd(1989b), though none of these treatments benefits from the linguisticallymotivated research of recent years Bliss (1972b) offers a glossary of IrishEnglish in the work of J M Synge, while Wall (1986) examines James

Joyce's work (see also Kallen 1987) Reminiscent of the observations ofMilroy (1984) and others, Wall (1990) discusses the apparent lexicalsimilarities between Irish and other English varieties, revealing pro-found dissimilarities of meaning or connotation which editors andtranslators unfamiliar with Irish English often miss.

There is as yet no reference grammar of Irish English varieties, nophonological atlas or even a published set of detailed phoneticdescriptions, and no dialect lexicon: in short, the working tools oflinguistic description are still being developed Note that many morefragmentary accounts have also been published in addition to the worksdiscussed thus far, and that unpublished theses and other material (herereferred to sparingly) also provide valuable information Apart frommore general English or Irish bibliographies, one may note as an aid tofurther enquiry the major bibliography of Aldus (1976), as well as theUlster-based compilation of Corrigan (1990) Dolan & 6 Muirithe(1979) and 6 Muirithe (1977a) consolidate most of the material on theForth and Bargy dialect, while Dolan's introductions to the recenteditions of Joyce (1910) provide a historical account of the study of IrishEnglish The work of the Tape-Recorded Survey of Hiberno-English issurveyed in Barry (1981a, 1981b) and Tilling (1985), while furtherhistorical and bibliographical material is also found in Adams (1964b),Quin (1977) and Kallen (1985)

FURTHER READING

There is no published comprehensive overview of Irish English Thoughhaving aims which differ from those of modern linguistic study, the works ofPatterson (1860), Hume (1878), Burke (1896), Hayden & Hartog (1909), Joyce(1910), van Hamel (1912) and Hogan (1927), in particular, are still useful for ageneral orientation and for primary linguistic material Henry's 1958 'linguis-tic survey' yields a great deal of raw data pertaining to syntax, phonology andlexicon, and is one of the few sources to discuss prosody systematically

General treatments of Irish English, then, are mostly to be found in volumes

of collected papers The earliest of these collections, Adams (1964c), arises fromthe creation in 1960 of the Ulster Dialect Archive in the Ulster Folk Museum

An anthology of Adams' work on Ulster dialectology, together with a fullbibliography, was published after his death in 1982 (Adams 1986) The 1974Thomas Davis radio lectures on 'The English language in Ireland' have beenpublished under the editorship of O Muirithe (1977b) Papers arising from theTape-Recorded Survey of Hiberno-English Speech are assembled by Barry(1981a), while 6 Baoill (1985) presents papers from a 1981 conference on IrishEnglish, together with two new introductory chapters The work edited by

Harris, Little & Singleton (1986), based on the 1985 First Symposium onHiberno-English, is the largest collection of papers on the subject publishedthus far Eleven papers on Irish English are also contained in a 1990 edition of

the Irish University Review (vol 20, no 1) dedicated to the memory of Alan Bliss.

Important monographs cover different aspects of Irish English The mostcomprehensive survey of the medieval language is found in the unpublishedthesis of Irwin (1935) Irwin's examination extends to the early nineteenthcentury, thus complementing in part the analysis by Bliss (1979) of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century literary texts Straightforward dialect studies arerelatively rare; note, however, the extensive Donegal glossary of Traynor(1953), Henry's (1957) study from Roscommon and Milroy's (1981) review ofBelfast English, which focuses on phonology and phonological variation.Milroy (1980) gives a major treatment of Belfast vernacular and relatedsociolinguistic issues, while Harris (1985a) examines Ulster English phonologywithin a historical and sociolinguistic context The substratumist hypothesis isput to a rigorous empirical test in Filppula's (1986) analysis of topicalisation

Ossi Ihalainen

5.1 Some early observations

Our knowledge of the dialects of England from about 1500 till the firstsystematic description towards the end of the nineteenth century comesfrom a variety of sources: occasional regional spellings that continuedinto written documents, comments (usually derogatory) by the or-thoepists, grammarians and lexicographers, glossaries of 'provincialwords', occasional references to local speech in travel literature, fictionaltexts written to illustrate regional speech, and the use of dialect inliterary works Dialect in fiction is particularly interesting because itplaces regional speech in a social context For instance, from Fielding's

Tom Jones we gather that in the eighteenth century there were members

of the landed gentry in the south-west who voiced their initial fricatives,

used un for him, thee for thou and dropped the second person singular subject in questions, as in Dost fancy I don't know it as well as thee; they had the third person singular present-tense marker -th with auxiliaries, but -J-

with main verbs What we do not find is the earlier common southern

and south-western use of ich for ' I ' , and we are left in the dark as to

whether this form had become obsolete in the type of languagedescribed, was not used by the type of people the writer had in mind, orwas simply not chosen by the writer to give local colouring Generallyspeaking, the picture that emerges from the early evidence is patchy,difficult to interpret and open to conjecture

Although some dialectologists have been rather pessimistic aboutdefining dialect areas with any precision, recent research carried outwithin the framework of perceptual dialectology1 has shown that peopleare aware of dialectal differences in their mother tongue and have ageneral idea of what the main dialect areas are.2 People are often even

able to illustrate the main varieties by quoting shibboleths like the

Cockney lidy 'lady', the Geordie doon 'down' or the 'Zummerset' %ider

'cider' One of the first English writers to exploit this awareness was

Chaucer, whose clerks in The Reeve's Tale use such northern features as / is' I am', sal' shall' and an unrounded reflex of the Old English long a, as

in twa 'two'.3 We also discover that from very early times onwardsregional speech carried a certain social evaluation: at least by thesixteenth century, speaking certain types of regional English was adefinite handicap Thus, Puttenham (1589: 121) points out that thosewho want to speak good English should in particular avoid imitatingthe English spoken by ' Northern-men beyond the riuer Trent' Besidesshowing a lot about the social evaluation of northern English, this IS aremarkably accurate localisation.4

One of the most interesting eighteenth-century occasional observers

on regional speech is Defoe In his Tour tbro' the whole Island of Great Britain (1724-6) he specifically comments on Somerset and Nor-

thumbrian English Somerset English is found particularly puzzling:

It cannot pass my Observation here, that when we are come thisLength from London, the Dialect of the English Tongue, or theCountry way of Expressing themselves is not easily Understood [I]t

is so in many Parts of England besides, but in none in so gross aDegree as in this Part; This way of Boorish Country Speech, as inIreland, it is call'd the Brogue upon the Tongue; so here 'tis call'dJouring It is not possible to Explain this fully by writing, becausethe Difference is not so much in the Orthography of Words, as in the

Tone, and Diction; their abridging the Speech, cbam for I am; chil for / will, don, for put on, and Doff, for put off; and the like (p 219)

He also went to visit a school in Martock, Somerset, where he listened to' one of the lowest Scholars reading his Lesson to the U s h e r ' :

[H]is Lesson was in the Cant [Song of Solomon] 5.3 of which theWords are these, ' I have put off my Coat, how shall I put it on, I havewash'd my Feet, how shall I Defile them ?'

The Boy read thus, with his Eyes, as I say full on the Text ' Chav aDoffed my Cooat, how shall I Don't, Chav a wash'd my Veet, howshalllMoiPem?' (p 219)Defoe is also the first writer to comment on the Northumbrian ' b u r r ' :

I must not quit Northumberland without taking notice, that theNatives of this Country, of the antient original Race or Families, aredistinguished by a Shibboleth upon their Tongues namely, a difficulty

in pronouncing the Letter R, which they cannot deliver from their

Tongues without a hollow Jarring in the Throat, by which they areplainly known, as a Foreigner is, in pronouncing the Th: This they callthe Northumbrian R, and the Natives value themselves upon thatImperfection, because, forsooth, it shews the Antiquity of their

Defoe notes here an aspect of dialect that modern sociolinguisticstudies have come across repeatedly: because they are seen as an integralpart of the values and lifestyle cherished by a specific group, non-standard features may have covert prestige, which explains theirresistance to change

In addition to casual observations, there are also surprisingly earlysystematic treatments of English dialects One of the earliest listings ofdialect areas was made by Alexander Gil (1564/5-1635), High Master of

St Paul's School Although his prejudices against dialectal speech appear

to have been less strong than those of his colleagues in the followingcentury, his interest in dialectal and vulgar speech probably stemmedless from his love of philology than it did from his desire to eradicateprovincialisms from the language of his young scholars Gil liststhe following six dialects, with the caveat that he ' does not know all theidioms of t h e s e ' : the general, the northern, the southern, the eastern, thewestern and the poetic (1619:102) Gil does not explain the geographicalboundaries of these, which suggests that people already had some kind

of general idea of where these varieties could be heard However, hedoes say that his own home county, Lincolnshire, is part of the north.This squares with Puttenham (1589), who appears to regard northernLincolnshire as part of the north

Gil goes on to discuss the main characteristics of each of these

dialects He says that in northern English both is beath, and attests thus the northern failure to round the original long a Other northern characteristics are he%' h a t h ' , sal' shall' and sen for ' self, all features that were still recorded by the SED in mid-twentieth-century northern English The SED shows that sal or its contracted form 's (also

mentioned by Gil) was still common in parts of Yorkshire in the 1950s

among the elderly rural working-class speakers (LAE M47) Gil also singles out contractions like Tl instead of I will as characteristically

northern forms This suggests that these forms originated in the north.The northern origin of these forms would explain the wide use ofcontractions in northern English even today These include the main

verb have, as in He's a car, and such negative forms as He'll not do it (rather than He won't do it) Of particular interest are Gil's comments on

diphthongisation in northern English These suggest that thongisation of earlier long vowels was more advanced in the norththan in the south (Wakelin 1988b: 133).

diph-Gil's southern English shows voicing of initial fricatives and the use

of proclitic 'ch as in chil'l will' and cham 'I am' Contractions like these

contrast sharply with the forms in the north, where the verb rather thanthe pronoun contracts Gil's western dialect shares with southernEnglish the voicing of initial fricatives, but it has its distinctive

vocabulary (nim, nem 'take', vang 'take, accept') and morphology (e.g i-do 'done') Although Gil's case for the south-west distinction is not particularly convincing, and he fails to point out the obvious fact that 'ch

was a common western characteristic, it is nevertheless significant thatthe west is seen as distinct from the southern region

One of the characteristics of Gil's eastern variety is the merger of ME

a: (name) and at (pay) as in modern standard English On the basis of this,

Kokeritz (1938/9) concludes that Gil probably had in mind EssexEnglish, where these sounds merge, whereas they are kept separate inSuffolk and Norfolk Equally important is his observation that in the

eastern dialect fire has a long monophthong /: rather than a diphthong

which probably represents [ai] He thus spots one of the developments

of O E j The SED material for lice (IV.8.1) and mice (IV.5.1) shows that

the present-day /i:/-area is generally confined to East Anglia and thesouth-east of England Another historically interesting point is that, inaddition to the south and west, the east, too, has voiced initial fricatives.Voicing of initial fricatives was later to recede to the south-west, andGil's observation helps us in determining the chronology of this

change: for instance, the 1640 edition of Jonson's English Grammar

specifically states that the letter Z ' never [occurs] in the beginning [of

words], save with rustick people, that have, %ed, sgy, %it, Zo, ^ome'.

5.2 Early glossaries and collections of dialect words

Important early evidence for reconstructing dialect areas comes fromdialect dictionaries These started appearing in the seventeenth century.The first real dialect dictionary was compiled by John Ray in 1674 and

was entitled A Collection of English Words Not Generally Used John Ray

was a member of the Royal Society, a botanist and zoologist, whobecame known for his systems of classification In fact, one gets theimpression that he became interested in dialects partly because of theregional variation in names of plants he was studying Although it is

difficult today to agree with Walter Skeat (EDS 6, 1874) that 'Ray's is

the most important book ever published on the subject of English

dialects', John Ray's Collection of English Words (especially its second,

augmented edition of 1691) is an important work in many ways Raydoes not say anything particularly specific about dialect areas inEngland, but his regional labelling of the entries gives us some kind ofpicture of what he thought were the main areas Ray distinguishesbetween 'North-Country' words and 'South and East-Country' words.Most of Ray's provincial words come from the north There are forty-eight pages of north-country words but only nineteen pages of south-and east-country words This probably reflects the distance of northernEnglish from the variety that Ray regarded as standard English

When entries are localised they are usually localised by county,sometimes by town, or a large area such as the West Country,' Essex, aswell as Norfolk and Suffolk', or 'Somerset and elsewhere in the West'.His ' South and East-Country' words have references to Norfolk, Essex,Sussex, Surrey, Kent, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, Leicester-shire, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall Of the 184 'Southand East-Country' words localised, only twenty-six are localised in thewest The most popular county is Sussex, which has fifty references.Ray's own home county, Essex, also has a high number of references;thirty-eight words are given as Essex words In contrast with his moredetailed treatment of northern areas, he does not, however, refer tospecified towns in Essex Sometimes a word is assigned to two areas,with one of them predominating, as in the case of the north-country

word murk:' murk, adj " dark " This word is also used in the South, but

more rarely.'

Ray's 'North-Country' section has references to Westmorland,Cumberland, Cheshire, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Lanca-shire, Northumberland, Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Shrop-shire Sometimes specific towns such as Sheffield are singled out

Although there is no systematic attempt to distinguish a specificmidland area, Ray occasionally refers to the midlands Thus the

distribution of nash or nesh ' washy, weak, tender, puling', is given as

'North-West part of England and also in the Midland, as in wickshire ' But there is no attempt to distinguish between east and westmidlands It would appear that Ray's linguistic map consisted basically

War-of two main areas, the north and the south, and that he regarded theWash-Bristol Channel line as the main linguistic divider in Englandrather than the Humber-Ribble line

Ray does not necessarily try to indicate the pronunciation of a word

and he does not seem to be interested in local pronunciations per se Thus, some northern pronunciations like mack 'make', which appear to

have been common in northern English in Ray's day (and indeedcontinued to be so until quite recently), do not attract Ray's attention,probably because this word was used more or less the way it was used inother parts of the country

Ray notices the word sull' plough' and lists it under his ' South and

East-Country Words', but unlike Marshall (1796), which gives the

pronunciation %ule and localises it as a west Devon word, there is no

indication that it might be pronounced with a voiced initial fricative.However, there are entries suggesting voicing of initial fricatives in the

south (e.g vollow' a fallow', Sussex, and vang' to answer for at the font as godfather', Somerset; but there are no entries with an initial £ or %h).

And at one point Ray actually states this feature explicitly After the

entry 'Vollow s a fallow Suss.' Ray adds: 'Generally in the Country, they use v instead of/, and ^ instead of s.'

West-5.2.1 Characteristics of Kay's south- and east-country

Ray's evidence is mainly lexical such as marvther 'girl' (Norfolk), seel ' time' o r ' season' (Essex) and sidy adj.' surly, moody' (Sussex) He does

not usually show how the words were used in phrases and sentences.But, as we saw above, Ray records the southern voicing of initialfricatives in his general statement and there are stray instances of thevoicing of initial/among the entries

5.2.2 Characteristics of Kay's north-country

Despite Ray's apparent lack of interest in pronunciation, the examplesthat he gives to illustrate usage nevertheless often contain significant

phonological features: for instance, so is not listed as a separate entry, but it appears in the phrase yable sea 'possibly so' showing the

characteristically northern lack of rounding Some consonantal featuresfigure prominently in the north-country section Yod-formation appears

in words likejance ' once \jane' one' zndjoon' oven', which incidentally are all pronunciations attested by the SED L-vocalisation, too, is well represented by entries like aud' old' and caud' cold'.

There is not much grammatical information in Ray's Collection: for

instance, he does not usually list function words, although this is a